TRIDUUM 2020
Easter Sunday
The Resurrection of the Lord
Parish of Holy Cross—St. John the Baptist
Midtown Manhattan
Earth quakes, Tyrants tremble, Jesus reigns
Herod: He raises the dead?
First Nazarene: Yea, sire, He raiseth the dead.
Herod: I do not wish Him to do that. I forbid Him to do that. I allow no man to raise the dead. This Man must be found and told that I forbid him to raise the dead. Where is this Man at present?
Second Nazarene: He is in every place, my lord, but it is hard to find Him.
Oscar Wilde, Salomé
While others fled, the women remained. As others cowered in secret, the women risked a public presence. The gospel proclaimed this Easter Sunday recounts Mary of Magdala alone in the predawn darkness keeping watch at Jesus’ tomb. The gospel of Luke remembers a group of women in the graveyard at daybreak, bearing burial spices to properly honor the body of the One in whom they had placed their hope. So, too, the gospel of Mark and the gospel of Matthew. We do well to honor their memory and their witness.
Yet, it is precisely their role as witnesses that is so peculiar in the gospel accounts – for in their culture in 1st century Palestine, they were denied the role of legal witness. They could not testify. They could not raise their voice. But, on the day that sees him rise, the women became the message-bearers of the unfathomable, inexplicable mystery of resurrection.
In light of Jesus’ life and mission, this appears to be no coincidence, no fluke. The One who had walked among his people opening the ears of the deaf and loosing the lips of the mute would once more give voice to the voiceless – this time with a truth beyond all telling. A truth that changes everything. Absolutely everything. He has been raised.
An empty tomb. A foot race between Peter and John provoked by Mary of Magdala’s strange tale. Terrified disciples fleeing Jerusalem for a hoped-for asylum in Emmaus. Burning hearts, broken bread. Our scriptures abound with a welter of encounters, experiences and images as they strain to bear witness to the immensity of the mystery – that Jesus has been raised from the dead in the power of G-D.
At the news, Mark reports wide-spread fear and trembling among both disciples and opponents of Jesus of Nazareth. Matthew is unique in reporting not one, but two earthquakes associated with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus – a ruptured earth providing escape from their tombs for those long dead. The witness of both these gospels renders perfectly clear the divine power unleashed in the Resurrection. And, in the face of that power, the subversion of all earthly powers. Resurrection is good news and immeasurable joy for the disciples of Jesus. It is also terrifyingly bad news for tyrants.
Death is the ultimate power of the tyrant; resurrection does not make a covenant with death, it overthrows it.¹ The raising of Jesus frees us from injurious powers that diminish and destroy human lives and communities. It opens a space in our midst in which to be reconstituted by the power of G-D, gathered into a true and robust communion in the grace of the Risen One, the living body of Christ in the world.
Perhaps this is the most painful part of our present situation of sheltering and quarantine in the face of pandemic. We are cheated of the great comfort of gathering in worship to ratify the covenant offered us in eucharist with our great AMEN. We are cut off from the great doxology by which we offer public praise and honor to the G-D of creation and covenant revealed in Jesus Christ. But these days shall pass. Even now, we are the body of Christ by grace. Even now, we are heirs to Christ’s life-giving kingdom. No force in our earthly experience can rob us of these:
The arrival of G-D’s kingdom precisely in the world of space, time and matter, the world of injustice and tyranny, of empire and crucifixions. This world is where the kingdom must come, on earth as it is in heaven. What view of creation, what view of justice, would be served by the offer merely of a new spirituality and a one-way ticket out of trouble, an escape from the real world?
No wonder the Herods, the Caesars and the Sadducees of this world, ancient and modern, were and are eager to rule out all possibility of actual resurrection. They are, after all, staking out a counter-claim on the real world. It is the real world that the tyrants and bullies (including intellectual and cultural tyrants and bullies) try to rule by force, only to discover that in order do so they have to quash all rumors of resurrection, rumors that would imply that their greatest weapons, death and deconstruction, are not after all omnipotent. But it is the real world, in Jewish thinking, that the real God made, and still grieves over. It is the real world that, in the earliest stories of Jesus’ resurrection, was decisively and forever reclaimed by that event, an event which demanded to be understood, not as a bizarre miracle, but as the beginning of a new creation… it is the real world in and for which Christians are committed to living, and where necessary, dying. Nothing less is demanded by the God of Creation, the God of Justice, the God revealed in and as the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth.²
He has been raised.
Earth quakes, Tyrants tremble, Jesus reigns.
¹N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, pg. 730.
²N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, pg. 737.